What Warehouses? Amazon’s Quarterly Message Is All Digital; “This past quarter, our top 10 selling items worldwide were all digital products – Kindles, Kindle Fire HDs, accessories and digital content”
July 27, 2013 Leave a comment
July 25, 2013, 6:44 PM
What Warehouses? Amazon’s Quarterly Message Is All Digital
By Tom Gara
One interesting line from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, announcing quarterly results today:
“We’re so grateful to our customers for their response to Kindle devices and our digital ecosystem. This past quarter, our top 10 selling items worldwide were all digital products – Kindles, Kindle Fire HDs, accessories and digital content,” You would expect something close to this — of the company’s ten best selling electronics items, five are Kindles. In its Movies & TV category, the top three are all streaming items from Amazon’s Instant Video service, as are eight of the top ten. So long, DVDs! Amazon had $15.7 billion in sales in the quarter, and while it didn’t make any money — it lost $7 million — growing sales by 22% is still pretty impressive for a company this size. That was helped along by some of the newer, less conventional parts of the company’s digital business — Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business, was responsible for almost 15% of the growth in U.S. revenues. For another sense of where management’s priorities are — or at least where management wants to say its priorities are — take a look at the “Highlights” section of the earnings announcement. Of the 19 dot-pointed highlights, only one is devoted to the company’s historical business of online retailing — a mention of the launch of its marketplace in India. Four more talk about achievements in the Amazon Web Services business, and the rest — the other 14 — are about the Kindle and its digital content store, or Amazon’s wider digital media business.